Facilitators Training for Women on Gender

The project Capacity Building for Gender Equality in Development, Peace and Security, started in the month of December 2015 at 5 districts of Karnataka. Training on the gender equality for the staff was a need of the time for an effective implementation of the project. A three days exclusive gender training workshop was organised by BREADS Bangalore from 4^th to 6^th February 2016. Ms. Asha V. from Visthar – an NGO working in the field of women empowerment since two decades – facilitated the training for three days. The training started at 10:00 am on 4^th February 2016 at the training hall of BREADS for a total 16 participants including staffs and women community leaders. The participants were from Yadgiri, Bellary, Chitradurga, Davangare, and Ramanagara. It began with a briefing on the objectives, activities and goal of the project. Fr. Joy – the Executive Director of BREADS Bangalore, spoke about the importance of gender equality and the respective project in the present society for a better community and significance of the training programme in the process. Later Ms. Asha took the floor to proceed with training on gender equality for three days. The core of the training workshop was gender sensitization, gender situation analysis and gender mainstreaming. Personal construction of gender, social construction of gender in social relations and institutions, gender mainstreaming, understand gender based violence against women, human rights and rights of women, legal provisions to redress violence against women were the topics dealt. Each session was activity oriented to make it simple and the participants actively took part in it. The activities helped to bring out participants viewpoints unbiased and the facilitator wrapped up the sessions by critically analyzing the remarks and giving a gender based conclusion to it with real life examples. During the workshop they also reeled videos to explicitly convey the message to promote gender equality in daily life. She also explained how to apply few tools that can be used in gender based training to make it more effective and life changing. The programme concluded with an action oriented work plan by the teams from each district and methods for vigilantly including gender equality in every programme implemented by the centers. The participants evaluated the programme to be good which changed their attitudes towards gender equality.